To Virgil: Aeneid Fans: Could the horse also signify an imposing culture that at first seems innocent and all other attributes thought to be held within a horse ie. loyal, strong, (the cavalry was always the strongest in battles). But with the acceptance of the horse [culture] which evolutionizes the traditional culture thought to be progress. Would this have any merit with respect to the meaning of the horse?
-----Original Message----- From: James M. Pfundstein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Sunday, April 11, 1999 2:57 PM Subject: VIRGIL: re: Why A Horse? At 12:18 AM -0400 4/10/1999, Catherine H Tate wrote: >I'd like to thank everyone who contributed to my question and the >>responses were most interesting and very informational. I had cut and >>pasted just your responses (i.e. not any names) to contribute your >responses >to my professor. Well, I think I intrigued his interest because >he asked >about who the contributer's were. I think that I accidentally >found an >interested subscriber who thought that this discussion was bogus >from my >previous mentioning of it. If it is "kosher" with all envolved, >may I >forward names and addresses to him; I did not want to with out >consent >even though he is a "Phd." I really think he might have been >impressed >that this is a serious "Net" discussion group. It's certainly o.k. with me. I always assume that a message I post to a list is a public utterance. And, in fact, they can be recovered from the archive (http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm) with a minimum of trouble. >Again thanks for the input on "Why a horse?" I have >come to a flexible conclusion that the "machine" built must have been a >device that resmbled the shape of a horse, unlike the literature makes one >envision a horse. Couldn't the Trojans have also taken the "ENGINE" into >their city inorder to keep the Greek's from scaling the walls? And in >thinking this would it not resemble the Hitites' war-machinery ingenuity? >Would it not have the long neck (like a horse) and then a protruding >forepiece that connected to the top of the walls. This image would seem to >look like a horse? This is certainly an interesting idea, but I'd point out a couple of things. First, in assessing what the horse is we have to figure out (God and Vergil forgive me) what the meaning of "is" is. Are we asking what the actual historical reality was of the siege at Troy? Are we asking what Homer and the other archaic Greek storytellers thought the horse was? Or are we asking what the horse is in Vergil's narrative? (We might also ask what the 4th/5th C. Greeks thought it was, or the Hellenistic writers, or the medieval writers. We might ask what Vergil himself thought it was, as opposed to the version he presents in his narrative. And so ad infinitum.) The point is that each of these questions might have a different answer-- Hittite military technology might have had a good deal to do with the fall of Troy, but a) we don't know, b) Homer & his oral sources probably didn't know and c) Vergil almost certainly didn't know. Second, I wouldn't lay too much stress on the fact that Vergil calls the horse a "machina." I know Lewis and Short, for instance, cite this passage under the sub-heading of "machina (= siege-engine, instrument of war)." But from a very early period, in both Greek and Latin, the word also (and very often) means "trick" or "stratagem." This meaning of "machina" accords very well with Homer's brief description of the horse, where he (through the mouth of Odysseus, incognito at the court of the Phaeacian king) calls it a "dolon (= trick)" Od. 8.494. all' age dê metabêthi kai hippou kosmon aeison dourateou, ton Epeios epoiêsen sun Athênêi, hon pot' es akropolin dolon êgage dios Odusseus andrôn emplêsas hoi rh' Ilion exalapaxan. --Odyssey 8.492ff "But come now, change thy theme, and sing of the building of the horse of wood, which Epeius made with Athena's help, the horse which once Odysseus led up into the citadel as a thing of guile, when he had filled it with the men who sacked Ilios." (Both the Greek text and the English translation are from the Loeb version posted at the Perseus site.) With all this said, I like your suggestion (as an imaginative speculation on the possible origins of the wooden horse story) very much. It certainly beats the corny old idea of a horse-headed battering ram. (If you're still looking for stuff, there are citations for this, and a couple other speculations about the wooden horse, in Stanford's commentary on the Odyssey, ad loc. 8.492.) JMP ("Pf.D.") ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
